* * * * *

"I wish I was young," the Judge had said, with a thrill and hunger that
was the soul of youth itself in his voice. At the moment when he said
it, a boy who had the privilege that the Judge coveted, and was not
enjoying it just then, was leaning against the court-house railing, and
watching Green River crowd into Odd Fellows' Hall.

Another boy had pushed his way across the square to his side, and was
not heartily welcomed there, but was calmly unconscious of it.

"Some night, Donovan," he remarked.

"Some night, Willard," Neil agreed gravely.

"Going in? Good for three hours of hot air?"

"I'm not going. No."

"Good boy. Say--" Mr. Willard Nash lowered his voice as he made this
daring suggestion--"we'll go around to Halloran's, and get into a little
game."

His invitation was not accepted.

"Jerry Dugan's not dead yet," observed Willard presently.

Strains of a deservedly popular waltz tune, heard from inside the hall,
gave faint but unmistakable proof of this. Willard kept time with his
feet as he listened, paying the tune the tribute of silence, a rare one
from him. Standing so, the two were sharply contrasted figures, though
the flickering lamps in the square threw only faint light here, and
showed them darkly outlined against the railing, as they leaned there
side by side. Pose, carriage, every movement and turn of the head were
different, as different as a bulky and overgrown child is from a boy
turning into a man.

"Some night," Willard repeated, unanswered, but unchilled by it, "and
some crowd."

The hall had been filling fast. Though the waltz still swung its faint
challenge into the night, so much of Green River had responded to it
already that now it was arriving only by twos and threes. But the groups
still followed each other fast under the big globe of light at the
entrance door, gayly shaded with red for the occasion, and up the bare,
clattering stairs to the floor above, and the hall.

Willard was right, more right than he knew. There was a crowd up there,
a crowd as Willard did not understand the word; a crowd with a tone and
temper of its own and a personality of its own. It was subject to laws
of its own and could think and feel for itself, and its thoughts and
feelings were made up of the brain stuff of every person in it, but
different from them all. It was a newly created thing, a new factor in
the world, and like all crowds it was born for one